JetCat

Hi developers, today I have noticed the first two bugs on the precious and very well programmed Hind. 1.) the turn knobs for the cockpit illumination on the lower side of the main panel are lit, but they are not lit on the right electric panel. 2.) the rain drops on the front windshield are unrealistic oversized and look like 10 inch sized water drops - please make a rain effects on the windshield with very small droplets like rain on glass would look like, for example as beautyful and realistic as on the beautyful F-16 canopy. Keep on doing your great work with that Hind, it´s an absolut fantastic helicopter!

Now I think I know what the problem is! It is called Vortex Ring which means the helicopter suddenly get´s some kind of blade stall or loosing lift force from the main rotor, begins descending with ten or twenty meters per second or more which means he is literally falling out of the sky, and giving full pitch in hot scenarios overwhelms the two turbine shafts with sudden torque request from the main rotor and makes the turbines just flame out. Amazing this is what I call a SIMULATOR, all other flight dynamics in other sims are simple to handle and overall simple with no damages or piloting errors whats-so-ever and mere simple toy planes compared to the DCS realism and depth of the flight physics engine physics and more I am going to try this: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3317338/ ...and see if the problem can be reproduced. Sorry my helicopter knowledge is very limited and basic and reduced to the very simple flight physics of a virtual Bell Jet Ranger and an Airbus EC135. Well looks like making a helicopter vertical descending with 500 or 1000 feet per minute on the VSI with slow forward movement 10 to 40 knots almost like it was some Cessna 152 before beginning to stop the descent 100 meters above the ground until almost hoovering by fully pulling the collective will not work because of vortex and blade stalling. Amazing flight physics!

Similar to the Tomcat A and the Tomcat B it would be awesome if there would be another Hind version available in the virtual hangar as an idea for the next helicopter after the Apache AH-64 is finished. Either the early Hind A version on the first picture, or the Super Hind which had been in development since 1996. https://weaponsystems.net/system/493-ATE+Super+Hind+Mk.+III It would surely be highly interesting having two different setups and cockpit layouts for the Hind, the original version and one with an MFD screen for the map

Hi pilots, this video is absolutely fantastic and I highly recommend watching it: And aren´t these some truly developer inspiring close-up shots for the next visual 3D-model update...?

Well in Metal Gear Solid a Hind can take about fifteen Stinger hits until it explodes... So 20x 30mm burst seems legit. Legends say that the armor is so thick that lasers from the year 2050 are necessary to really damage this beast. edit: The USS Zumwalt railgun seems effective too, but only when hitting the engine area or the gearbox.

The liveries of the Hind are the best fictional liveries so far! The first module where I am using a lot of fictional liveries because they look THAT awesome. Well the Serbien JSO is real, but there are many many others that look even better than the original Hind versions were painted. It won´t take long until a Chernarussian skin arrives to download In the meantime I can highly recommend some other highest quality liveries.

The Grim Reapers tutorial video says the Hind flies best with autopilot assist in all four modes. The yaw assist always on is very useful to keep it stable, but the altitude autopilot mode on the right button is only necessary hoovering and doing some weapon training.

It happened again, but this time for no reason! After having experience with the Hind for a few days now I can fly almost perfect. In this case the helicopter went high up into the air with full collective in the cockpit start and take-off training mission. Everything went PERFECT, I lowered the collective a little bit and braked the helicopter in-air by pulling up the nose slightly and lowering it´s speed to ten knots. The helicopter with auto-pilot assist was hoovering fine with a forward-speed of only ten to twenty knots for some time, and I thought this is the ideal speed for an almost VTOL landing. I noticed that the variometer still showed some ascend rate therefore I lowered the collective lever another tiny bit to get a 50-100 feet per minute sink rate and slowly let the Hind hoover down to the ground and land. Suddenly the rotors begun their shiiiii shiii shiii shii sound and the Hind begun wobbling like crazy, the main rotor speed went fully down and the helicopter flew out of the skies like a dropped stone. It was the only re-build Prototype from the Nimitz and it is lost now... Again my question: What am I doing wrong? A helicopter is VTOL-landed by lowering the air speed and slowly gently lowering the collective pitch until the variometer shows a slight sinkrate, I am doing this for 20 years in virtual Jet Ranger and EC135 and other virtual helis - why is the main rotor and the engines suddenly "switching off" while gently hoovering in mid-air when I land the Hind the same way I land any other helicopter?

After Operation Mount Hope III.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mount_Hope_III ...the US Navy finally has their own A-10 Warthogs for aircraft carriers in form of a VTOL helicopter. The helicopter got her maiden flight in 1990 before being stationed on the Nimitz carrier. But something went wrong! These two 30mm cannons are only shooting 5.56mm NATO shell casings the engineers had to re-do the whole cannon on the drawing board.

Greetings and good morning, my idea for future updates are: More training missions and training flights! I really like the feeling and immersion of being in a flight school and try what I have learned from the handbook and the YouTube tutorial videos in-game, and listen to the flight school teacher, getting interesting technical details and procedures explained and so on. So please implement more training missions, not only three, especially weapon training for these awesome gatling and grenade launcher pods that can be mounted on the Hind´s wings. And emergency training procedures what to do in this or that case, and how to fly the Hind by the book. (The same idea of course would be great for the F-16 and the Tomcat too.) Have a beautyful weekend

Hi pilots Because of aesthetic reasons I am upgrading the RAM of my computer. I like this black pure minimalism techy military prototype design of the T-Force Dark Pro, plus it is the fastest RAM available - it can go up to 3600MHz with CL14 timings. This thing is way faster than the current RAM but also very pricey and that´s why only 16 Gigabyte of RAM is possible. Currently 32 GB g.Skill Trident Z 3000MHz CL14 is implemented into the system and DCS fills it up very good as you see in the Taskmanager. Will there be any performance problems when only having half the RAM gigabytes available in my computer next week for the first time? The RAM upgrade is necessary to make the computer look more stealthy and minimalism and techy. Have users with only 16 gigs on board any performance issues with this sim? (I also have a Corsair Force MP600 NVMe which was the fastest NVMe in 2020 to install Windows and DCS on it for virtual RAM extension if necessary.) Have a beautyful weekend!

Yes I have noticed that the gauges illumination of the Tomcat is no longer looking good and realistic and beautyful like in the Hind but kinda like as if the gauges were filled red in MS Paint. I hope this will be fixed soon because evening flights with beautyful cockpit illumination are the best.

Of course it is possible to dim and switch off all lights to fly stealthy. This is the panel for the exterior lights.

Hm i thought the Hind becomes completely invisible to IR tracking with this diffusor. It looks like cool fresh air is sucked into the deflector and forced-mixed with the hot exhaust gasses to cool them down even more before exiting upwards.

This 14 day trial phase is absolute PERFECT and every day I like that Hind more and more! And yes it is much harder to fly than the F-16, but that cockpit gives off such a special vibe and feeling I love it.

That´s one really hard decision, isn´t it? It depends what you want to do with the airplane, and you can fully try both modules for 14 days to see which one you like better. I of course would answer only with: You absolutely need both modules. But let´s say you have very limited budget and get only one or want to learn only one study-level plane for now. The more easy way is the Hornet. If you prefer a quick learning curve the Hornet is perfect for you because it is rather easy to start control fly and land. The Hornet has a very forgiving flight physics and is easy to control. The Tomcat is more difficult to fly in my opinion and is not forgiving anything, if you pull too much g´s her wings will break away, no computer assistance in flight, pure hands-on manual flying. I don´t know what you are but us millenials are so called "HUD-cripples" which means we are literally disabled when no or very limited HUD information is available. The Tomcat has a limited HUD with no speed gauge, you will notice how difficult landings are when you have no speedometer in the HUD but somewhere deep down on the instrument panel. Stalling or getting too fast will happen very often I personally almost never use any weapons but fly for the sake of speed and being inside a jet (well sometimes the cannon for fun and replaying weapon tutorial videos just to know how to handle them). If you want a wide variety of weapons and a huge arsenal of everything - the Hornet can carry everything. The Tomcat only Sidewinders and the Phoenix. If you want air to ground missions the Hornet has a wider variety of missiles and bombs, the Bombcat only has these Mark84 (I guess, I have not yet learned how to fly Bombcat missions just Air-to-Air so far.) But: The Tomcat has class and is THE PLANE within, the most famous of them all. The cockpit looks absolute stunning it´s 100% photorealism and a superb sitting-inside-a-cockpit atmosphere mood and feeling. The Tomcat absolutely looks fantastic and offers so much more study-level stuff to learn and is more complex and more interesting than the Hornet. Don´t worry if you never learn to land a Tomcat on an aircraft carrier that´s the only thing I cannot do either The Tomcat has these cool variable wing geometry and looks absolutely stunning, and she is hellish fast. The Tomcat has a superior realism in the cockpit visuals, it´s the best cockpits I have ever seen. The only negative aspect of the Tomcat is that there is no animated turning low-pressure turbine wheel in the exhaust cone, I dislike this failing of bringing utmost visual realism but I still hope it will get patched some day. (The Hornet has a rotating third-stage turbine wheel in the rear cone.) Well you can fly both jets for 14 days so no need to think too hard about which one is right for you, just try it out and find it out

Hey that was really interesting to read! Thanks for all the information. And yes I used full engine power (page up or rotating the pitch lever clockwise to the max) all the time plus full collective all the time during the normal cruise flight. In Syria my Hind failed two times right after taking-off when doing so, but in cold Caucasus the flights went rather good - until pulling the nose up at 200-300km/h to air-brake the helicopter, or doing turns with high speeds caused the engines to fail. I love this realism and the chance of breaking such a magnificent and complex machine with wrong piloting and piloting errors it brings so much more challenge and realism into the flights and makes actual observing the gauges necessary! In all other flight simulators absolute NOTHING ever happens, the turbines can run with 120% N2 and 1001°C ITT in the Death Valley the whole day without anything ever happening, the landling flaps can stay out 40° out till mach 0,90 and contracted and extended again and NOTHING no stupidity and piloting errors have any consequences, and any damage model on airplanes is literally not existent. In DCS the landing flaps of the Tomcat will fail when staying out for too long because of gaining too much speed too fast after the carrier launch, parts of the gear and the gear covers are blown away when extending the gear in the Hornet while flying too fast, the canopy glass is blown away when opening the canopy during flight to enjoy some fresh air - DCS has such an intense damage model and realism and so many interesting reactions to various experiments with the plane or actual piloting errors one must really think about all the physics and taking care of the planes! I absolutely love that! For the first time ever I felt like flying a real Helicopter in that Hind and being in need to carefully watch the instruments. Awesome! Allright the manual says engine power should always stay on "nominal power" (pressing page up to maximum turbine RPM and torque) and the engine pressure rate is fully controlled with the collective pitch lever. Thanks for the info I had not studied these chapters in the handbook yet - I just tried to fly What exactly does the condition lever to the engines? It´s the two levers left of the collective pitch lever.

Hello and a wonderful weekend to you all I have zero experience with PC VR, but several dozens of hours with PlayStation Pro VR in Gran Turismo and Ace Combat 7 VR. That´s why I wanted to know which VR headset is best on PC for users with limited budget. The Oculus Quest 2 currently costs 350 € and I wanted to know how good it is for DCS jet and Hind flying. (Wow I love that Hind it kinda feels like sitting in some retro-future eighties mech!) Is the graphics and the resolution of the Oculus Quest 2 awesome, or is a strong fly-fence effect visible with low resolution and strong immersion-breaking line shimmering and aliasing effect? The second question about the Oculus Quest 2 is about sizes dimensions proportions and scaling in the virtual 3D space. PlayStation VR always had a problem about getting size proportions correct! In many PS-VR games the scaling was completely off and waaaay to small, sometimes stuff in PSVR was almost half the size of it´s real world counterpart (only "Farpoint", "Robinson the Journey", "The Inpatient" and "Resident Evil 7" got the scaling and proportions right, in Gran Turismo and Ace Combat my virtual hands had the size of a seven year old child and the cockpits only had about 3/4 of the real world´s size....). This is why scaling is so important - is the scaling and the feeling of size and dimensions in PC-VR Oculus Quest 2 correct and life-like, or will I again have the feeling of being some 120 centimeter baby dwarf body on an elementary school pupil´s chair when looking down on my own virtual body and cockpit seat? In VR especially the scaling and the feeling for dimensions is very important for realism and the perfect being-inside-a-cockpit mood and atmosphere. The third question is about the controls. The Oculus Quest 2 has some hand-pieces or hand-controllers I don´t know how this things are called. Is this used to click switches inside the cockpit, or can the mouse be used? Thanks for the answers

The same day PMDG releases their Boeing 737 legends say it will be in August 2021. But August came and went so no one knows for sure when the next releases will be. But if it´s as awesome as the Hind, it will be a great day!

One of the best cockpits ever created.

I have an idea for a later update: Please give the Hind in the options menu the option to equip it with infrared blocking exhaust or to use the classic big oval round exhaust, similar to the F-18 Hornet cockpit variations.

No I was just trying to fly a curve (or turn) to the left or the right while 200km/h or 250km/h. Not a really sharp turn. Or when I brake the helicopter by pulling up and reducing collective pitch. Occasionally the rotor begins to make a strange "shii shiiii shiiiiiiii shiiiiiiii" sound and is suddenly getting slower, sometimes the Hind recovers and returns to normal flight behaviour but sometimes the rotor is getting slower and slower and the helicopter is literally falling out of the sky. This behaviour is truly interesting, a very sophisticated physics and flight dynamics engine and I assume the real Hind has done the same thing - but why is it doing this? Is the huge multi-bladed main rotor overpowering the torque of the turbines in this case when doing a maneuver while being too fast, what is happening?

I think graphics and visual quality, immersion and eye candy, and visual realism > way more important than another ten FPS to the already 100 FPS....

A similar problem occured in my Syria border patrol mission. The helicopter behaved very strange and not as usual in other missions or trainings - it was not able to gain altitude, was just hoovering 20 feet above the ground as if incapable of leaving ground effect, and rotating counter-clockwise the whole time no matter how much pedal I gave. It did that two or three times until I checked where the tail rotor pitch limit system in the cockpit is positioned because I thought this is the problem (I read that in hot areas the air is less dense and the tail rotor needs a sharper angle of attack to be effective enough - this handbook is absolute fantastic! So much background info about the history of the heli, technical details, physics and cockpit stuff....) but the SPUU-52 tail rotor limiter was not the problem - it was switched to off all the time. Even if I cannot really read this manual moving map and hope in secret that the Hind will get an avionics update some day (a more modern cockpit to choose from with some kind of MFD screen for map navigation while the rest of that AWESOME cockpit should stay the same), and even if it cannot leave ground effect in the Syria mission but only have a Hind that is helplessly turning in endless circles ten feet above ground without gaining altitude - still one of the best helicopters ever made for any simulator because in all other locations and missions it works flawless so far.

This Hind is pure awesomeness and attention to detail. I love it! I am not used to helicopters and still learning the basics of flying such a machine this will take a few weeks to 100% master it before going to the weapon systems.